Guild Wars 2

DreamOfACure.4382:

The point of kits is to keep them in use for substantial periods before switching to whatever else you want to use.

… and kits have a 1 second cooldown on swap, why? If you compare to elementalist attunments (the only comparable mechanic), the short cooldown makes it obvious the intended use is to swap in and out of them as the situation dictates. You may personally just go into Grenade kit and sit there for 10min at a time, don’t assume everybody plays the same way. I run tri-kits most of the time and I switch a lot to get the most out of the abilities (I rarely actually use the #1 on anything).

Can we stop trying to nerf grenades? Yes they are powerful, but the rest of our kit is pretty weak so lets get that up to par before we go suggesting ways to ruin our “big” hitter.

As for Shrapnel, it being 5s isn’t that out there as some have stated, lots of classes have a 4-6s cooldown #2. What should be done is to bring pistol back to nearer its old level for condition stacking to make it a better alternative to using grenades to get some bleeds. Grenades are very much in the “power build” camp and shouldn’t be particuarly great at doing conditions.

coglin.1496:

I prefer it the way it is. Even without full health, often I am leaving them for later or for others.

All though I could see the merit of the double tap idea.

That was the intent with the double-tap, you get the exact functionality we have now PLUS the ability to chug it when its in front of you, this would be especially nice for the #4 that cures conditions, I hate running through Orr and getting imobilized and my only cure sitting there in front of me taunting me that I can’t drink it and go :P

Well being that the Engi has an entire traitline and set of abilities that are elixirs (ie, Alchemical) using a bow with various types of alchemical arrow tips would be very in character … not to mention really cool.

Net arrows, explosive arrows, poison bomb arrows, random “hey, I wonder what this does!” arrows, Tybalt’s new automated piercing, particle lancing extendo-bolts (codename: A.P.P.L.E), the list goes on!

The problem with a keyclicker is ANet not only refusing to comment in some cases but giving outright conflicting information in others. Here is my request to support to ask if I could use a G-Key on my Logitech to press 1 every half second or so for grenade use so long as its held down (so still interaction on my part, but holding not rapid clicking):

Me:
Playing an Engineer with the lack of auto-attack for the Grenade kit (its a GTAoE and thus can’t be auto-attack set) is causing me some issues. Is it allowed to setup one of my G-Key macros on my Logitech keyboard to repeat a press of “1” every second while held down as opposed to having to push the key every second to obtain the same effect?

I’d like to make clear I mean for it to only be a single key, not a complex ‘rotation’ or anything like that, and i’d like to ask if I can set that up without causing trouble for myself and my account.

Reply:
The use of automated play is not allowed. You can read our policy about Third-Party Programs here: https://forum-en.gw2archive.eu/forum/support/account/Policy-Third-Party-Programs/first#post354869

So in this particular dialog the answer is very much not a chance whereas the reply to the “combat mode” mod was much more of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” response which is a much more extensive change that I asked for. All in all, i’m still tapping a way on my ‘auto-attack’ key for grenades when needed but I spend a lot more time using rifle these days.

While its not quite as powerful in raw damage output as grenades (what is!), I still findg plenty of use for my rifle in a power/elixir build just due to the amount of control it has. Fighting veterans or other players is very much rifle > grenades for a large part of the fight (though I tri-kit and swap a lot :P).

Two suggestions for this:

1) Make the abilities double-tap. Ie, once you drop the bottle the ability changes to one to grab it and drink it during the cooldown, so you can choose to grab and drink it or leave it for others.

B) Make it interactable like turrets and other items through the ‘Interact’ popup either for just yourself (probably better) or for everybody instead of running over them, though the latter would cause a lot of interact spam everywhere.

I’m with Lladarya, I didn’t spend all this time coming up with my outfit only to never be able to see the upper half due to a giant backpack :P If they do fix it, i’d love a toggle for it as well.

Short Answer: No
Long Answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooo

We don’t need this, we do not lose a utility slot to equikittent, we have the toolbelt skill to even out the number of abilities we have which is more than other classes with a ‘bundle’ kit (like ele conjured weapons for example). Not to mention many engineers use multiple kits so restricting us to just 1 is a huge nerf in both playstyle and versatility.

Kits need 3 things (2 now they fixed one):
1) Sigils need to work, especially ‘on weapon swap’
2) Stats on your gun (or pistol/shield etc) need to apply even when a kit is equipped; note, we are already balanced around us having those stats look at sPvP where no stats on weapons (its on the amulet) so we get full benefit then.

I love my Engineer personally, but, I will never stop complaining about the (still) bugged problems the Engi has, and has had since BWE1, until they are actually fixed .. heck, even just acknowledging that ANet knows and intends to fix them would be a step up at this point.

Like I said though, I love the class, the asthetic and the playstyle and I don’t really want any of that changed, just the bugs fixed and some tweaks here and there (like buffing some of the kits and giving us more than “1” elite :P).

Surely an easyish fix to this problem (didn’t actually know about it to be honest, i’ve only used Elixir X in the mists for playing around) would be to make you Invulnerable during the transformation cast time. That way you’re still out of action for a second or two while it happens but can no longer be knocked/killed out of it.

As many have said, the big problem (or one of them) is #2 just not working that well, either by bug or design. I think the easiest fix would be to either:
a) Make it able to be detonated with a 2nd press, which has the pitfalls that it moves quite fast which can cause issues with high latency.
b) Make it detonate when it hits a target, not at the ‘end’ of its range. So if a target is right in your face when you lose it, they get hit by the projectile (and take the minor damage it does), then it detonates at that location doing its bigger AoE. No latency, no (or less) terrain problems and makes it the high burst its seemingly intended to be.

Short Answer: No
Long Answer: Noooooooooooo

Not to be to blunt, but what you’re basically asking for is to remove what makes the Engineer unique and in addition add a lot of extra work for ANet to basically come up with a whole bunch of new weapons designs (lets face it, if kits become weapons there would now have to be variation). Also, just to note, we don’t lose utility slots we have the toolbelt to give us a useable ability for each slot ‘lost’ to a kit.

Also as pointed out, your solution removes the ability to triple+ kit, I run with 3 kits as standard and I do not want to lose that ability.

The solution is to simply make the stats (and sigil) of your weaponset apply to kits, for ‘on swap’ sigils they just need an internal cooldown which most already do due to being usable on Elementalist Attunements which; as has been noted before, is how our kits should behave stat/sigil wise (they can swap at will and their weapon stats apply to all the attunments, they don’t lose them when they switch).

Top 5 hates I guess:

1. The bugs (getting better though).
2. The RSI inducing #1 on Grenade kit.
3. Turrets not being any use even with traits.
4. Personal dislike of our Elite choices (they are fairly dull and unless I need supply drop, I use my racials for something interesting even if weaker).
5. Toolkit not being very good as our only melee, i’d love if the damage was upped a little and for the #1 skill to hit 3 targets like a lot of the other melee weapons do across the game.

I find the opposite problem personally, I have to many armour sets I love the look of, though i’m a Sylvari on my Engi (plant with a flamethrower <3) and mix in the cultural stuff whenever I can.

As for weapons, the only time I really look at my weapons is when i’m not in combat, and if i’m not in combat, kits aren’t hiding it so I can bask in the glory of <insert rifle here> looking awesome.

I actually thought all this ‘omg, mobs hate me why!’ stuff for Engi’s was just out of proportion, but after doing a story mode today i’m not so sure anymore :P

Couple of times I just let myself auto-attack 1 trash mob (with rifle) and all 3 trash mobs decided to turn me into kindling in favour of punching our melee range Thief in his ‘oh so smug’ face rant

I love the way the rifle currently works personally (all the control), but I do agree that we could do with a proper long range option because while grenades do give us long range they have a rather, unique, method of doing so and sometimes it’d be nice to just shoot something in the face from a distance :P

Adding a new weapon for one class is to much to ask really and you can’t really give us a long (or short) bow as it doesn’t fit the class asthetic which leaves the most obvious option open… give us a new kit! Sniper kit, cannon kit (ala Torchlight 2) etc, whatever works and fits best. It would need to be long range (1000-1200, maybe through traits to increase) and primarily be single target (maybe minimal AoE) as we have AoE range in grenades already.

That, or buff the pistols range up to 1000 base + 200 with trait and let that full the long range need but pistol seems more or a skirmishing ‘med-range’ weapon.

While this would make kits scale better, it still just a bandaid to the real problem of kits being bundles and not taking stats/sigils from the equipped weapon and that is what needs to be fixed (or changed).

There is no reason for our kits to not be effected by our equipped weapon(s) and any issues with balance (due to the extra power given) can be sorted after the fix if its even needed just by scaling down the base dmg of the skills to compensate, but as it stands we are the -only- class in the game who has minimal benefits from sigils (and none at all in the case of the weapon swap ones).

Its also not entirely fun that our kits are roughly equal to ‘blue’ weapons (stat wise) and we therefore miss out on the power increase of upgrading to masterwork→rare→exotic weapons.

The orb system -needs- to be changed from what it currently is, and yes, making the Orbs give PvE buffs is probably the best way to do it. At present, the winning server will inevitably get 3 orbs and then their power to keep winning snowballs as they now have better stats and more hp making each of their invaders tougher than the opposition.

Giving the orb ‘bonus’ to the losing side is bad as well as it then punishes the winning server for, well, winning. Making the orbs give a bonus to something -other- than WvW fighting is the best solution and by making it give PvE benefits it’ll encourage more participation by the more PvE orientated players as they’d now have a vested interest in helping get the orbs*.

• Giving stats in PvE could be an issue balance wise, so maybe something like each orb owned gives +% MF, or +% base run speed (still capped at 33% with Swiftness) etc.

TL;DR – make orbs buff the PvE side of the server, not the WvW/PvP side

I can confirm, bomb kit auto attack does work, grenades are GTAoE so auto-attack wouldn’t exist. What you’re asking for is the #1 skill to be a targetted AoE (ie, how it works underwater) which I would very much like as well but it would require some balancing* above and beyond simply changing the skill.

• grenade spam underwater is -very- powerful, it would absolutely be an issue on land in its present state if #1 could be auto-attacked. Yes, movement means it would miss against a single target, but in ‘zerg’ combat it would be absolutely devastating.

Although I still have complaints and bug fixing desires with Engi (who doesn’t!), this is a good patch overall for Engi’s and I feel the class is a large leap closer to being “done” than it was 30 minutes ago.

… yeah, auto-attack means that much to me :P

It does indeed look like there was a mixup or something else here based on that change. I’m personally still giddy over finally having auto-attack, but that won’t stop me voicing a bit of complaint over this as well :P

Inventions – Tier 3 (XII) – Rifled Turret Barrels
Turrets deal 15% more damage and have increased attack range.

Inventions – Tier 2 (IX) – Elite Supplies
The Supply Crate has extra supplies, Elixir X lasts longer, and Mortar has increased range.

As of this path, Elite Supplies does not effect Mortar, Rifled Barrels does but only increases the range by 100 (up to 1500, same as traited Grenades). It, unfortunatly, still leaves Mortar in a fairly useless state unless you are being nice to a nearby Guardian stuck on a wall or you have a burning hatred for Grenades.

Auto-attack makes me happy though still :P

While i’d love an actual slot for kits so we could get different appearances, it probably is to much to ask for at the moment and, to be frank, we need a kit fix ASAP as our class cannot really be balanced until bugs like this are fixed as it will notably change our power level.

A ‘hidden armour slot’ for weapon would be one bandaid fix, but then so would simply making kits no longer be bundles as well and we know ANet has the technology for multiple subsets of a single weapon in the Elementalist Attunements* so using that codebase would potentially get our fix.

• I am not saying I want Attunements with the cooldowns and restrictions like Ele’s have, I simply mean behind the scenes, everything from a player point of view would stay the same except, you know, the bugs not still being there :P

Engineers (like Necromancers) just need their, almost game breaking, bugs fixed before any real over/underpowered discussion can take place. Being able to use sigils/stats on kits and have auto-attack working alone would notably buff Engi’s damage output for multiple kit users as would quite a few of our other bugs (the elixir related ones especially). This also applies to Necros who are in a similar “holy bugs batman” state.

I’m not entirely convinced they haven’t artifically lowered the cap for being rated as Full as my server has been Full every time I (or anyone I know) have checked the last few days and we had long periods of Medium/High only as little as a week ago. It could be the server (or the game!) simply got an influx of new blood lately of course.

My main issue is the people trying to join in my case are friends (of friends) who through various reasons ended up on other servers and there is no way for them to come join us at the moment* and that -is- a problem ANet needs to find a solution to.

Allowing a pre-existing player on a server to put out an ‘invite’ token would be one solution to bypass the “cannot transfer while full” issue, but then so would fixing guesting and disabling the free transfers as well.

• Kind of annoyed you can’t even transfer server if you delete all characters as one friend would be happy to do (only recently started), but you are locked down the first time you login unless its changed in the last week.

I do agree that there is a real missed opportunity by not allowing any class to use any armour (or even mix pieces from different armour ‘tiers’). An idea to perhaps balances allowing such a mix would be something like:

Light Armour: +5% Endurance Regeneration / piece
Medium Armour: -
Heavy Armour: -5% Endurance Regeneration / piece

Numbers as examples obviously, but playing on the most logical restriction of armour being the ability to dodge; easier with cloth and a lot harder in a full suit of plate. People would then have the choice to lose their toughness (EHP) in order to gain more dodge opportunity.

The potential for problems (balancing aside) would be recognizing other classes in PvP (though I think that would be part of the metagame going for deceptive looks) and in sPvP simply make armour of any tier look like armour of the classes ‘default’ tier (all armour has a matching light/med/heavy look). For WvW, let the deception commence.

There are several things that really make MMO’s on a console a problem though:

a) a keyboard, its simply not possible to communicate with people as quickly using a console letter select compared to a keyboard (and not everybody has voicechat).

b) hardware resources, an mmo often uses a lot of RAM and (for some reason I still don’t understand) console makers refuse to bung 2GB+ in a machine which is why most console games have fairly small maps to offset this issue. Well, as you’ve noticed, guild wars doesn’t have small maps…

c) fairness. This mainly applies to PvP/WvW but using a mouse and keyboard to move/turn is faster than a controller and there have even been studies showing the difference in FPS (admittedly less so in GW but would still be an issue).

Now a) and c) could be mitigated by using a keyboard and mouse accessory but at that point, you may as well just use a PC (and point b) will never be fixed until console makers put better hardware in their boxes).

As pointed out, the ‘easy’ fix is just to limit mails to X per time period (probably X per hour rather than per day) with exceptions for guild mates, friendslist and current group members. I’d wager 90%+ of legitimate mail is to one of those 3 categories so it’ll never hurt actual players.

This is a little bit of a copy of whats going on over on the Elementalist forum and seems like a good idea. We’ve got so many bugs on our class, and a whole heap of suggestions and ANet has said many times that while (obviously) they want all bugs fixed, they have to prioritize and can only do so many. So, every Engi, put here what is your #1 most desired bugfix and, just for some additional choice, whats your most desired new (or changed) feature of the class you’d like, with your personal reason as well if you’d like.

• This will be almost -all- personal opinion from the posters, not really intending this to be a discussion of whose ideas are better or worse, we have plenty of threads for that.

My Bugfix
Fix the ‘kits as bundles’ problem and let us have sigils, stats and autoattack working like we’ve been told is coming for so long.

My Suggested Change
Give us a new melee weaponset, either a 1H mace (to go with pistol/shield offhand) or a 2H hammer. Both are fairly ‘in character’ and would give us a nice change of pace from our primarily mid-range offense. Make the weapon be heavy on (possibly aoe) damage and minimal control and it’d be a nice change from toolkit which is heavily leaning towards control than outright head smashing.

I’d say Fort Aspenwood is doing fine in this bracket, during the day you’re often leading (or 2nd) in points, and last night, even during your ‘off hours’ you still took 2/3 of the eternal battlegrounds for a time and thats Isle and Sorrows best time of the day.

I sound biased being on Isle probably, but this matchup is substantially more fun than last week with points going back and forth nearly constantly unlike the previous week where it was pretty much an ET dogpile with a couple of Isle and Sorrow people in the middle :P

Whild I badly want the stat/sigil/attack thing fixed on kits, i’d love a new proper weapon as well, even if its not something unique (probably to much work for one class sadly), just a hammer would be great as Wildwood suggests, and would really fit the engineer theme and give us another melee option.

… especially if they could add a giant wrench in as a skin somewhere in the game cough torchlight 2 style *cough.

Strifer.3507:

But I’d have to disagree that weapon kits be made into individual weapons just because they took up a slot in our utility. Our class mechanic toolbelt skill more than makes up for the lack of utility slots, unless of course you are running with 3 turrets build which pretty much inefficiently clogs up your toolbelt everytime you deploy turrets.

Please read the OP, I, and nobody who has supported it, wants our kits to actually -be- weapons with all the attached limitations, we just want the behind-the-scenes mechanics to work differently from how they now do so as to fix the sigil/stat/auto-attack issues. Nothing (other than the bugs being fixed) should change from -our- point of view, i’m just putting forth a suggestion that the whole ‘kits are bundles’ thing be changed as its apparent now that making them work properly while still being bundles is a big problem to fix (3 BWE + a month after release, its not a quick fix thats for sure).

… and my 1 key is getting mushy due to my love of tri-wielding kits.

I personally think siege should be disallowed in that entire region. Players stopping others with knockbacks and keeping people in combat is fine as you can retaliate, but the siege is over the top. I speak from experience of trying to do the puzzle yesterday (i’m on Isle) and was stopped several times until I gave up and tried later by a group of Aspenwood (I think) with siege in the animal pit.

Though there were plenty of SoS before the dark room just dropping arrows and the odd grenade down to keep people in combat for the jumps, so its not entirely one sided here, all 3 sides are doing it :P

Yup, it makes Engineer incredibly fun underwater, grenade kit, toggle on auto attack (grrr that we still have to!) and annoy the entire area with exploding screen shaking :P

Personally (note, personally!) i’d love if skill #1 on the land grenade kit was changed to the same system while retaining GTAoE for the other 4.

Nyota.7062:

‘You cannot drop bundles while in the air’?

Why, for kitten’s sake, why can’t I?

Many dropped bundles leave a shiney behind when dropped, if you could drop them in the air it would cause the shiney to be floating and look bad or glitch; this just goes to my point that kits shouldn’t be bundles being that we don’t leave our toys behind when we switch them (would be kinda messy if we did…).

Shimond.2478:

Just having them factored by your equipped weapon would be the ideal solution. If they were to make them weapons you could only have two ‘weapons’ like everyone else, and if they did attunements there’d be a lengthy cooldown there as well.

Thats the whole point of what i’m trying to suggest :P We wouldn’t have ‘only two weapon’s nor would we have attunment cooldowns, those are both balancing issues not coding issues. Its how our kits are represented by the game code itself, that is, as bundles which is what causes all the sigl/auto-attack/stat problems, nothing -needs- to be changed as far as how kits are equipped in utility slots with no cooldowns etc etc to change them to ‘attunements’ from a code viewpoint. I’m simply using elementalist attunments as the nearest similar system to how I think kits should work as they show that subsets of a weaponset can exist in the GW2 codebase that pull stats from the primary weapon.

To address 2 of the comments:

Coglin: The problem with that is it’d still require interaction with our weapon (or overall gear) stats to properly give us equivalent benefits. If not, where do you set it? Are kits = to exotics off the bat at 80 which gives us a free headstart, or are they equal to rare/masterwork (which is roughly where they are now) in which case we fall behind once everyone has exotics; the easiest way to fix is to simply pull the stats off the currently equipped weapon (also allows sigil use as well as i’m pretty sure nearly everybody has a different opinion on what the best 1-2 sigils to use are).

To the few saying they don’t want mechanics to change: That was the point of the clarification in the OP, I don’t mean for there to be -any- mechanical changes from a player’s perspective other than the bugs on auto-attack, sigils, stats etc being fixed. From what I recall reading and the way they currently work, kits are considered bundles (from a code perspective) and are treated like any other bundle you can pick up in the game world. Counter to this are elementalist attunements, they are still “subset weapon skills” (like how our kits appear to us), but use a seperate code mechanism to display themselves that -does- allow autoattack, stats, etc to function. I’m simply asking for that code to be ported over to Engi’s to give us the same benefits without the troubles we currently have, nothing like cooldown or number of choices is intended to be affected, purely the behind-the-scenes mechanism to make it work.

I can think of plenty of other changes i’d love to see on Engi (a non-gtaoe #1 for grenade kit on land would be my first :P) but fixing the kit/bundle thing I think is most important, especially as we can’t be properly balanced at the moment until its fixed as stat scaling, sigils and even just not having to stop and CTRL+Click every few seconds would drastically alter our DPS potential.

Whatever the original intention behind making kits bundles (mechanically) and not weapons seems to be the crux of the auto-attack, sigils and weapon stats not working for them and as its been 3 BWE and 3 weeks into launch with no sign of a fix its obviously a difficulty issue.

Can’t we just have kits treated like the elementalist’s attunements* where all the above problems do not exist?

• I don’t mean from a player’s PoV, kits should still be a utility choice and we should still have the toolbelt, I just mean behind-the-scenes treat kits like the attunments as far as making them a ‘subset’ of the currently equipped weaponset; abilities would still be the same, but they would then pull their damage stats from the current weaponset rather than the baked in stats they now have, should fix autoattack and sigils as well (especially as most (all?) sigils for ‘on weapon swap’ have an internal cooldown already).

Any chance of a temporary fix of just setting kit skill #1’s (except Grenade on land of course) to be auto-attack by default on equip? I can think of notably less times i’d want AA off than the times I want it on, on switch.

…assuming of course thats not harder to implement than whatever intended fix is in the works, though given its 3 BWE and release since it was first mentioned, i’m guessing its a real brainteaser.